Decoda’s Music for Transformation: Songs from Inside Maximum Security Prisons at the Weill Music Room
The Weill Music Room sits everyone close together, and from behind the last row a long lens still gives me real face, which isn't true of most rooms that size. So reach wasn't the question on this one. The job was that Decoda kept changing shape. Chamber group one moment, full band the next, a solo voice out front, and I was moving between the back, the side, and the balcony to find which frame each new configuration actually made readable.
Decoda built the program around music created by incarcerated composers, much of it connected to Sing Sing and to a facility in Lee, with most of the arrangements done by the ensemble's bassoonist, Brad Balliett. That premise changes what I'm watching for on stage. These pieces weren't written toward applause, and that shapes the kind of frame worth holding for.
The group split in two. Decoda's five chamber players were Catherine Gregory on flute, Paul Wonjin Cho on clarinet, Balliett on bassoon, George Meyer on violin, and Claire Bryant on cello, with guest artists Mike Bono on guitar, Greg Chudzik on bass, Mikael Darmanie on piano, and Matt Smallcomb on drums. The two halves kept reorienting around each other, and that's what I had to read in real time and pick a position for. When the chamber players were out front together, I was watching for the moment all five were at their stands and legible at once. That window is narrower than you'd think.
Meyer was one I didn't have to wait long for. Bow arm fully extended on a downstroke, head down, eyes on the stand. I held on him for a stretch and that frame resolved.
Weill has a mezzanine, and I used it for the group configurations, because it's the only way to get the full ensemble and the audience in one frame. From up there I could see the keyboard at house left, the strings in the middle, the horn players standing, the rhythm section across the back, and Sarah Elizabeth Charles at center with a mic.
Charles, the vocalist, anchored the second half. A solo voice on a mic frames differently than a string section does, because there's no instrument to build the composition around. Balliett was at his stand to her right, so the whole right side of the stage held together in that frame even at distance.
For the woodwind and strings passages I was on the standing players. Balliett's bassoon is a long instrument to shoot, the bell coming up high and cutting into the frame in a way that reads from behind. In the group shot with Balliett, Cho, Gregory, and Meyer together, all four have stands in front of them and the piano fills the back left. Bryant was seated at cello, which anchored the left side of the composition.
Gregory got her own frame earlier, before the full ensemble came together. Close shot, long lens from the back, blue window light behind her, brow slightly contracted, eyes on the stand, the flute angled out. That's the kind of tight frame the room's scale wouldn't normally hand me, but the lens covers the distance.
Smallcomb on drums was in the back right corner of the stage, which from the rear of the hall put him about mid-field for the long lens. The red kit reads well against the blue windows. In the tight frame he's mid-stroke, one stick up, the other on the snare, eyes out toward the ensemble rather than down at the kit. The wider frame puts the whole rhythm section in context: bassist standing at the back, Balliett and Bryant in the left foreground, the full arrangement in one shot.
Decoda is a New York-based chamber ensemble, and this was original work. The coverage spans the room, the full ensemble, and the individual players across both halves.
If you're putting an ensemble on stage that keeps reconfiguring through the night, that's the kind of coverage I work to stay ahead of, moving through the room to keep each new shape readable. I’d love to talk through what it would look like for your program. Reach out here.
